Infinite Possibilities.

Today’s Marketing Cookie is about the meaningful things you can create with limited tools and resources.

Every marketer, at some point in their career has been asked to create more leads, more awareness, and more engagement — and do it with less budget. No problem. Right? After the initial panic shrinks your can-do-ness, you regain your composure and decide that this is when necessity must give birth to nearly identical twins: invention and innovation.

Today’s fortune describes the basic elements, from which endless variations of design, form and expression can be created. WARNING: It may blow both sides of your brain just thinking about it.

Only 3 colors:

I worked on the team that produced the Canon Expo in New York City, where some astonishing innovations were showcased. A crowd constantly gathered by a large TV screen with the highest resolution ever created, capable of displaying over a billion colors. It must have been expensive too, because there were two smile-free armed guards posted on either side of it at all times.

Only 7 notes:

The fact that there’s over 100 million copyrighted songs available on iTunes boggles the mind. Even if you strip away 10 million songs that are unique covers of other songs, that leaves 90 million songs, all of which have been created from the same notes. If you attempted to hear all those songs, you would have to listen continuously without any sleeping breaks for 513.7 years.

And the numbers:

This brings us back to the tall order that came down from the higher ups. They want bigger numbers this quarter without spending any more digits, but the math doesn’t add up. Or could it?

By taking stock of the basic marketing fundamentals upon which every marketing campaign is built, it is possible to generate a windfall during a shortfall. I know because I’ve seen it done.

When I was President-elect of the AMA in Boston, we hosted “The Shoestring Marketing Awards”, which aimed to shine the limelight on the company that generated the greatest results for the lowest cost. The judges unanimously selected a scrappy little Boston-based company with 10 employees that had generated an amazing amount of traffic to their website, just by writing optimized content — and spending zero dollars.

The name of that little company is HubSpot.

Now with over 7,500 employees, they began by transforming those basic, fundamental elements into something meaningful, truly embodying today's fortune: “…it's what we do with them that's important”.